Pay Attention: A Labovian Study into the Production of Dental Fricatives by German Speakers of English

This study draws on research in areas of intraspeaker variation, specifically Labov’s work on speech style, and second language acquisition, to examine whether second language (L2) speakers of English follow similar patterns of intraspeaker variation as a function of formality as first language (L1) speakers of English. The participants were five female university students or recent graduates who all shared German as L1 and English as L2. The sociolinguistic interview method was adopted from Labov’s work to elicit speech samples from participants in four different contexts ranging from least formal to most formal, beginning with a casual interview stage, moving to reading aloud a short passage, a list of words in isolation, and finishing with a list of minimal pairs which contrasted the target sound, dental fricatives, with phonetically-similar sounds. These voice recordings were then auditorily and acoustically analysed to find which speech contexts yielded the most standard productions, showing that, similarly to L1 speakers, L2 speakers show a positive correlation between the formality of the context and the amount of attention paid to speech and the frequency of standard productions. Additionally, it was also found that in situations where other sounds were used as replacements for the dental fricative, voiced alveolar plosives replaced voiced dental fricatives and voiceless labiodental fricatives replaced the voiceless dental fricatives in all cases except those in which coarticulation occurred. The implications of this study are far-reaching, demonstrating crossover research is much needed in the areas of L2 acquisition and L2 users’ speech patterns